The beast’s rate of progression with speech was ridiculous.
Maybe it was five, maybe it was fifteen days, but even if she took the higher end of that estimate, learning to speak so quickly and legibly in such a time frame was an absurd feat for something that was decidedly not human, and most likely less intelligent than one as well.
She hesitated to call it a dog, because while its legs and paws felt like a dog’s, it was much, much too smart, and that was without considering its strength comparative to its size, as well as the fact it had some Skill for tearing apart iron.
Whether it was a dog or not, however, she could think of at least four scientific institutions and noble families each that would be losing their minds just to get their hands on the beast.
As for her, she was just hoping it would stop talking already.
Understandable or not, the sound was horrendous. It made her skin crawl and her eardrums squirm inside her ears.
It had, very suddenly, improved in its ongoing attempt at human speech, but that didn’t make its ‘voice’ any better. It was a concoction of growls, quiet howls, grunts and whines, mashed together and twisted to form words, and she would rather glue her ear to a loudspeaker as it broadcasted someone scraping their nails against a chalkboard than listen to it speak for any prolonged period of time.
At least at first. Much like she’d grown used to the pain, she eventually got used to the horrific mimicry of human speech, and it was a lot less terrifying to listen to when she held its paw in her hand, the beast no longer some unknown entity but a small, albeit extremely disturbing, creature. Hopefully of a canine build.
She’d even managed to make it fall asleep eventually, and soon followed suit.
When she’d woken up and started practising, she had to stop in puzzlement as she felt a surge of mana nearing her location, hurriedly using cancellation commands as her heart started slamming into her ribs.
For her to feel that mana from the other side of the pit, whatever was coming was big. Some field effect? Or…
Or poison cleanup, for when the rats were too many to clear with mercenaries and adventurers for a reasonable price. The realization was almost disbelieving, a faint feeling of betrayal nestling in her heart. Did they even send someone to check for survivors? Did they do so and then decide to kill her anyway?
She was going to die, trapped in a metaphorical box and gassed like a rat.
Everything she’d been through, all that training, twenty years of living, just for that.
“Fffuck.” She half-laughed, half-sobbed out, her breaths stuttered and her chest quivering from nerves, her mind and body unable to pick between sobbing or laughing hysterically, her body trying to switch between them with each stuttered, tiny breath as she suppressed it.
With a hurried, panicked train of thought, she tried to come up with alternatives that didn’t make her fear a slow agonizing death, but her mind remained stubbornly attached to reality, telling her insistently that there was hardly anything else that would feel like that.
She didn’t get the chance to further attempt to delude herself before a pair of canines chomped through her torn garment, somehow not chewing into her flesh, and then dragged her down the stairs with haste she hadn’t been expecting, letting out a short cry of anguish as her broken legs slammed into each step with loud clangs of metal.
Gritting her teeth with an agonized gurgle, she jerkily lifted her hand up to the beast’s neck, and before it could pull away this time, she used a mildly overcharged [Haste] spell on the beast. After a single second where it froze in surprise, it continued, practically flying down the stairs.
Through her panic, she only barely managed to open her System screen and put her spare Attribute point into Endurance in the hopes that she wouldn’t come out of this without legs, feeling her broken bones grind against each other inside her flesh, nothing but the snug fit of her iron greaves and thick pants preventing her bones from splintering out of place.
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The most horrific, vile poison it had ever smelled suddenly entered its nostrils, making its eyes fly wide open.
Its nails scraped loudly against the iron as it hurriedly jumped to its feet, struck with a sudden bout of panic and indecision.
The scent was overpowering. And it was getting closer, fast.
It dashed to the railing, ignoring the strange sounds of the human, and tilted its head to look up.
It flared its antennae, aimed its ears to funnel the sound into its eardrums, and took a deep sniff, just to confirm what it dreaded.
It quickly located where the scent and the extremely faint sense of mana was coming from, four relatively thin pipes that were bolted to the corners of the pit. Its eyes trailed up along the pipes, until its head was tilted upwards, where the pipes curled inwards along the top rim, snugly fit under the metal walkways above, where the humans would hook their trash carriers.
Along the cube-shaped frame of the pipes, were spots where rectangular metal blocks extended, pointing down, covered in small circular holes.
A design it had seen many times before, one that was definitely designed to spray out some form of gas or smoke.
And not all gases floated up, many floated down.
Understanding of what was happening was swift, and decisive. The humans were going to wipe the pit clean, using poison, and it was poison that neither itself, nor the human could survive.
Maybe the scent was much worse than how strong the poison itself was, but if it wasn’t, it was much worse than almost anything it had run into so far. This was poison made to kill, not a byproduct of the human machinery.
So it had to leave, now.
Tilting its head down however, presented it with another problem. The spinning gears were crunching away at the several feet tall pile of trash above them, and that made any and all rats that were occupying the pile rush up to the surface, likely done on purpose by whoever was controlling everything.
Just from a cursory, rushed headcount, it could see at least as many rats as it had killed with the staircase, with more rushing out of the slowly lowering mound of trash, climbing along the ridges and squeezing out of the grates one after the other.
There were hundreds of them.
It was, once again, completely stuck.
If it took one step down there right now, all it would take would be a single rat to alert a small horde of its kin to tear the wolf apart.
But the only way to escape the poison was to go down, ride the trash, hope it didn’t lose its footing and get crushed, and manage to scramble to a pipe large enough to squeeze into. The topmost row of gears had a gap of about a human’s height, and the rows tightened in increments of about a foot from what it remembered.
So while difficult, it could probably survive all the way down as long as it kept its footing and its body in the middle of the gap. However, all it had sensed underneath the gears when it had been sniffing around with its antennae was a gigantic nothing. The drop below could be twenty feet or two hundred, it had no way of knowing right now.
Additionally, the human.
It wasn’t sure of how it would save her.
It certainly had the strength to do so, as its new tendons finally finished during its most recent nap, not a moment too soon, but saving her would be difficult regardless.
It needed more time to think.
Tilting its head towards the pipes, it saw the first wisps of the poison puff out in a steady stream that lazily floated downwards, blotting out the human nest's innards one inch at a time.
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It turned, bit into the human’s garment while making sure its teeth were blunt to her skin, then hurriedly dragged her down the steps, ignoring her exclamations of pain, hoping to take her down to the second floor to buy just a bit more time to think of a viable plan of escape, if not for both of them, at least for itself.
Halfway to the second floor, her hand raised to its neck in a familiar manner, but it was too distracted to react in time, only managing to freeze as her fingers tapped its fur.
Her mana did something, and suddenly the world was far more vivid, far more slow. Whatever she did was only beneficial, so it didn’t bother wondering, simply resuming its hurried pace.
After positioning her body sideways on one of the steps on the second floor, it unlatched its teeth and peeked through the bottom gap of the railing at the rats.
From what it remembered, their scent receptors were much lesser than its own, but far more than a human’s. So they would eventually smell the poison, likely soon, and hurriedly throw themselves into the pit, assuming nothing alive caught their attention.
It didn’t have much time to test its newfound strength, nor did it know its limits at the moment, but it did not want to let the human die. Getting another one would be an utter pain, especially a blind one that it could easily isolate and spend time with. If it could save the human without sacrificing its own survival, it was going to do so.
Even while its eyes were flickering back and forth from the rodents to the steady stream of poison hiding the innards of the human nest above them, it could faintly feel where the human was, a curious feeling it didn’t care to question at the moment.
A plan quickly began to form.
A mildly risky one, but the only one it could come up with that would make both itself and the human survive the coming ordeal.
Speaking of the human, it was starting to hyperventilate behind it, so the wolf chuffed as low as possible, snout turned towards her.
“Oh… I thought you left.” It whispered, barely audible even to its own ears. She sounded relieved, and her breathing slowed a little, so it chuffed low again, before prowling down the stairs, gleaming gold orbs focused on the vermin littering the pit floor.
It just needed to get its antennae to touch the stone. The vibrations didn’t travel well between different materials, all it could sense when feeling the metal staircase were a couple feet of stone, and the entire staircase itself.
Slowly, it activated [Echoes of Oblivion], trying to restrict the skill to only cover its eyes to conserve mana, to middling success.
With its head as a wispy effigy of darkness, it flared its antennae, and extended its snout down to the stone at the last step of the staircase.
And it quickly realized that this might become the most bitter fight for survival it had to date.
The rats in the pipes were everywhere. No matter what pipe it picked to scramble onto, there would be rodents waiting to pick its bones clean. They were even more numerous than during the staircase incident.
The constant vibrations of the gears provided it with a mental image that was extremely detailed, even if the Perception bonus it had gotten from the human’s Skill faded, so it quickly located the single best pipe in the interweaving network underneath, one just big enough for the human and itself to fit into and maneuver, with only a few rats scurrying about inside.
Likely because of the thick iron grate that prevented the rodents from fleeing, but that wouldn’t be a problem for the wolf.
It tilted its head up.
The poison was almost half-way down the pit.
It needed to wait just a little bit more.
It covered its legs in silent darkness as it dissipated the mist around its head and quickly scrambled up to the human, chuffing again to notify her of its presence. She murmured something the wolf didn’t pay attention to, her breaths still rough and stuttered from the pain. Nothing the wolf could do about that, she’d just have to endure.
The relative silence felt suffocating as the seconds rolled by, its eyes nailed to the horde.
As the poisonous cloud descended to just after the middle point, a few rats started sniffing the air and looking up, squeaking in alarm and becoming more animated, as if unsure of what to do.
The alarmed squeaks that signified danger multiplied quickly, and soon enough, most of the rats on the surface were scrambling into the tiny grates at the edges of the pits, those that could fit.
The rats scrambling up from the shifting, rumbling mounds of trash caught up quickly and started trying to burrow downwards to the pipes, snaking between bits of discarded metal, many of them quickly getting crushed by the gears.
The gas was now two thirds of the way down, and every sniff of the poison made its nose protest as if doused in acid, despite the amount of particles it was inhaling only being the absolute minimum for any scent to even register for most creatures it knew of.
That stuff was probably strong enough to melt the human, nevermind just killing her.
Some rodents squeezed into the metal guides on the side of the pit’s walls to make their way down to the pipes below for more safety, most of the bigger ones however simply jumped off to burrow into the trash and get crushed.
Truly stupid creatures, waiting on top was the only way to survive.
The garbage heaps were steadily lowering, and the wolf quickly regarded the falling poison, and the speed at which the mounds of trash were lowering, and...
They had a chance. A fairly slim one, but it was there.
It bent down to bite onto the human’s garment again, tilting its head to check up on the cloud of gas and the rodents.
Twice as strong as yesterday with its new tendons in full function, it didn’t need [Bloodrush] to drag the human, so it saved the Skill for later, and dragged her down, slowly, making sure not to be sudden and have the human make some loud sound of pain that would attract the rodents before the wolf was ready.
Its heart hammered in its chest, [Devourer] whispered in its ears, begging for a feast, for action, and adrenaline ran thick in its blood like glue. Its body was almost shivering from the wild mix of dread and anticipation, but it refrained from any hasty actions, for the moment.
Dragging the human off the last step of the staircase with a light rattle until her shoulder was parallel to its own, it spent a moment to fix its grip, and with its head sideways, prepared itself for yet another close brush with death.
The smell of the poison was overpowering, the rodents covered the sides of the pit like an undulating blanket of filth as they scrambled to find some random pipe to escape into, dozens of them slipping off or being pushed off onto the retreating mounds of trash below, and the ones that were impatient simply jumped off on their own to try their luck with the gears.
It raised a hind leg to tap the human’s left wrist, a short grumble rumbling out of its chest, a wordless request.
Her hand raised to hesitantly tap its hip, yet no Skill infused its limbs, the motion almost like a question of its own. It tapped her again with a growl, and the human made some short sound of realization, before tapping its leg once more, and the wolf felt the world become brighter, more colorful, slower, louder and more tactile, every minute shift of its body increasing in speed it wasn’t expecting.
While the previous boost felt like its body became lighter, this one felt like its body was utterly weightless, the feeling twice as potent.
The human started coughing, finally able to smell the poison, presumably.
The metaphorical clock was ticking, and the wolf realized that it couldn’t wait any longer. There were only about twelve feet of air between them and the poison cloud.
A blanket of death blotted out all light as it descended, and in the darkness, two gleaming golden eyes narrowed as the wolf bent its legs in a crouch, its body pointed straight at the pit with its head wrenched to the side, canines tightly holding onto its human charge.